So until the gun control argument becomes a real argument instead of a transparent power grab, there’s only one appropriate response to liberal gun banners. And it’s similar to “Screw you.”

Obama is lying – about gay marriage, about your doctor – and he is likewise lying about guns. The minute he could disarm every American civilian he would, something particularly alarming in light of his pal Bill Ayers’ infamous observation that ‘fundamentally transforming’ America would require killing at least 25 million citizens.

When Planned Parenthood ends the life of not one, but millions, of humans the same people outraged by a dead lion go mum.

Bud Norman:

The dentist apparently thought he was shooting an arrow into some anonymous lion rather than a celebrity lion, so far as we can gather from the voluminous news coverage, and since we have to admit even at the risk of of being accused of species-ism or some other damning ism that all lions look alike to us we are sympathetic to his defense. ... We’re also skeptical of the widespread notion that celebrity lives are somehow of greater value than others, whether leonine or human, so that is also a mitigating factor in our decision not to threaten that Minnesota dentist’s life.

Nor can we understand why the public is more outraged about the life of a even a celebrity lion than about the lives of the zebras and gazelles and maybe even the human beings that the lion would have eventually taken had he survived that Minnesota dentist’s safari. There’s an old Jerry Seinfeld comedy routine about how people always root for whatever animal is starring in a nature documentary, with people cheering on the hawk as he swoops down on a field mice to provide food for the adorable baby hawks back in his nest but hoping for the field mice to outrun those deadly talons and get back to his own adorable children when the show is about field mice, and we think some gruesome footage of even a celebrity lion chowing down on a zebra that had been given a top-billed role might even make that Minnesota dentist seem heroic. It’s a rough world of kill or be killed out there, and we’re genuinely sorry about that, too, but the attention being paid to the killing of a lion somewhere in Africa seems outrageously inordinate.

There’s a late night comedian out there who reportedly teared up as he tried to make mean jokes about that Minnesota dentist, even though he’s never been so choked up about the Christians being routinely beheaded by the Islamic State, and some of our Facebook friends posted that the lion’s death makes them ashamed to be human, even though they’ve previously been unashamed by the far more common slaughter of their fellow human beings in the daily crime reports, and a liberal but otherwise delightful woman we ran into at a ballgame Wednesday night was saying that she hopes all of the beasts of Africa slaughter all the African people, even though at the ballgame the night before she was defending the “Black Lives Matter” movement that shouts down anyone who dares say that all lives matter, and it all seems rather silly. We are genuinely sorry that lion was killed, but at the moment we’re more worried about the lives that will be lost when Iran gets a nuclear bomb due to soft-hearted and even more soft-headed western sensibilities, and the black lives that will be lost when the police go into full retreat for fear of well-intentioned reprisals, and the aborted lives whose parts are being sold for scrap on the open market by an organization that enjoys millions of taxpayers’ dollars and the support of all the right people ...

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

The representative model is now defunct, destroyed in somewhat different ways by the two political parties. We will start with the inappropriately named Democrats.

The Democratic party of today is not a representative party, but a top-down political machine organized around a reformulation of traditional socialist ideology. They are not a party of the popular will, but a party of a particular set of ideas. The people who adapt these ideas to current needs are not the Democratic base, but a small group of intellectuals drawn almost exclusively from a handful of elite universities. Trusting the public will is a laughable proposition for academics, who consider themselves a superior breed -- like the philosopher kings of Plato’s Republic. They may adapt their rhetoric as required for the sake of harvesting votes from the lowly herd, but the core concept of public sovereignty was dropped from leftist thought long ago -- about the time it passed from the hard hands of embittered revolutionaries into the soft hands of tenured professors. At a practical rather than an ideal level, socialism has never been particularly democratic. The socialist state has always been the instrument of one or another narrow group of planners, not answerable to the public’s will.

Moreover, the actual Democratic Party of today is actually a degenerate socialist party, often mixing crony capitalist practice uncomfortably with socialist rhetoric. Obama’s speeches, and perhaps his self image, aren’t all that different from Fidel Castro’s -- but he does have a far wealthier circle of friends. While incompatible ideologically, socialism and crony capitalism do share in common the centralization of real power -- so perhaps they are not all that different in actual practice. Neither bodes well for what little political sovereignty you and I still have.

The Republican Party, as embodied in its establishment core -- people like Karl Rove and Reince Priebus -- is a different sort of animal from its dingy, pseudo-leftist counterpart, but not really a more attractive or more encouraging one. It has become painfully obvious in the last few election cycles that the Republican establishment despises its conservative base. Most of us have grown tired of watching the GOP bluster and promise to stop ObamaCare, executive amnesty, etc. – only to fold for no apparent reason after a few weeks or months, vowing “this isn’t over!” once again. The truth is that it was over before it started. At the risk of being called racist, the Republican Party seems to function more or less as the nameless team that plays against the Harlem Globetrotters. They provide the illusion of a contest to events that have been carefully choreographed in advance. Their current strategy, assuming for the sake of argument that they are even interested in electoral success, appears to be to trade their traditional base for those lost souls in the political center -- those people who only engaged in politics by tottering into a voting booth once every four years. Perhaps such chronically distracted souls will be charmed by uncle Jeb’s endearing smile -- but that hardly seems to capture the notion of a government of, by, and for the people. New Republican voters ought to take note of how dismissive the party has been toward the old ones. Most Republican politicians, in short, have come to represent no one but themselves.

What makes the abortionists possible?

Now it is easy enough to remark and lament the moral coarseness of these women, the particularly repulsive way that they combine violence and greed. But I would like to explore a deeper issue that these videos bring to light, namely, the forgetfulness of the dignity of the human being that is on ever clearer display in our Western culture. One has only to consider the over 58,000,000 abortions that have taken place, under full protection of the law, in our country since Roe v. Wade in 1973, or the ever more insistent push toward permitting euthanasia, even of children in some European countries, or the wanton killing going on nightly in the streets of our major cities. The figures in my home town of Chicago typically surpass those recorded in the battle grounds of the Middle East.

What makes this sort of startling violence against human beings possible, I would submit, is the attenuation of our sense of God’s existence. In the classical Western perspective, the dignity of the human person is a consequence and function of his or her status as a creature of God. Precisely because the human being is made in the image and likeness of the Creator and destined, finally, for eternal life on high with God, he is a subject of inalienable rights. I use Jefferson’s language from the Declaration of Independence on purpose here, for the great founding father knew that the absolute nature of the rights he was describing follows from their derivation from God: “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…” When God is removed from the picture, human rights rather rapidly evanesce, which can be seen with clarity in both ancient times and modern. For Cicero, Aristotle, and Plato, a cultural elite enjoyed rights, privileges, and dignity, while the vast majority of people were legitimately relegated to inferior status, some even to the condition of slavery. In the totalitarianisms of the last century—marked in every case by an aggressive dismissal of God—untold millions of human beings were treated as little more than vermin.

I realize that many philosophers and social theorists have tried to ground a sense of human dignity in something other than God, but these attempts have all proven fruitless. For instance, if human worth is a function of a person’s intelligence or creativity or imagination, or her capacity to enter into friendship, then why not say that this worth disappears the moment those powers are underdeveloped, weakened, or eliminated altogether? Or if respect for human dignity is related to the strength of one’s feeling for another person, then who is to say that that dignity vanishes once one’s sentiments change or dry up? My suspicion is that if we interrogated people on the street and asked them why human beings should be respected, some version of this argument from sentimentality would emerge. But again, the problem is that feelings are so ephemeral, shifting and changing like the wind. If you doubt me, read some of the accounts of the officers and soldiers in the Nazi death camps, who, after years of killing, lost all feeling for those they were murdering, seeing them as little more than rats or insects.

For the past two hundred years, atheists have been loudly asserting that the dismissal of God will lead to human liberation. I would strenuously argue precisely the contrary. Once the human being is untethered from God, he becomes, in very short order, an object among objects, and hence susceptible to the grossest manipulation by the powerful and self-interested.

[Referring to Trump's supporters] Perhaps they don’t see the abjectly crude Trump as any more crude that Barack Obama calmly in academic tones assuring Americans that they all could keep their doctors and health plans when he knew that was simply untrue or announcing to the nation that his own grandmother was a “typical white person” or advising supporters to “get in their face.” They see Trump as no more vindictive that Harry Reid lying about Mitt Romney’s tax returns (and then bragging that such a lie helped defeat him), or a Sen. Barbara Boxer publicly attac­­king the single, non-parental status of then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. And they certainly don’t see Trump as uncouth as an Al Sharpton — former presidential candidate, chief advisor on matters of race to Barack Obama, and current TV news show host. Trump’s crass bombast is enjoyed by the fed-up crowd as the proper antidote to the even greater bombast of the Left, who created Trump’s latest manifestations.

Monday, July 27, 2015

"After five Marines are murdered, why is anyone making sure Muslims are OK?"

Trying to keep Liberal pieties straight when they collide is hard. So Obama decided to commit a bit of cultural imperialism in his ancestral homeland.

One ironclad rule of modern liberalism is that every primitive instinct of third world hellholes as such Kenya are to be regarded as ancient wisdom far more profound than anything our decadent western civilization has concocted, and that any attempt to correct them is tantamount to cultural imperialism, but another even more ironclad rule is that homosexuality should not only be tolerated but celebrated with the rainbow colors on the White House, ...

The reluctance to criticize the tribalism of such third world hellholes as Kenya can be explained by Obama’s affiliation with a modern liberalism that feels obliged to apologize for saying that “all lives matter,” which also explains the reluctance to criticize the Afro-Marxism that has reduced Kenya to squalor, and the unscientific nature of Kenyan society has at least arguably reduced its contribution to the superstition of “global warming” or “climate change” or whatever they’re calling it these days, and we understand that the privileged white women who comprise the modern feminist movement in America don’t really care about what the black women in Kenya are enduring, but it’s still hard to see why homosexuality is the only issue that is exempt from the otherwise ironclad rule about one nation trying to dominate another. Domestic politics is an obvious explanation, but modern liberalism insists that it is above such crass considerations.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Republicans have no one to blame for Trump except themselves

Casey Stengel, when he first began coaching the Mets, and they were losing big, said: “You look up and down the bench and you have to say to yourself, can’t anybody here play this game?”

That’s what I want to say to the Republican bench as they face the Trump phenomenon. Based on current polls Trump would lose the general election if he got the nomination because his negatives are sky high. Yet polls tell us he’s the most popular candidate with the base of the Republican party. And the reason is blazingly obvious: he’s not afraid to embrace politically incorrect positions on illegal immigration, he promises the return of the American Dream, and he attacks the Democrat press with glee.

He’s not going to get the Republican nomination because Republican Party activists are not going to support him. Which makes me wonder why the Republican bench lacks the smarts to shut up and stop attacking him. Trump’s popularity among the public – especially the Republican public – has nothing to do with Trump as a person. He’s best known as a real estate developer, a shameless self-promoter with a series of trophy wives. He has a history of supporting liberal programs and liberal politicians plus he’s braggadocios, egotistical and arrogant.

Trump-the-man is not leading in the polls; it’s Trump-the-idea that is getting support. Here’s his idea in a nutshell: the problem with America is its government, not its people. His message embodies the spirit of America even as his persona is off-putting. Ronald Reagan said “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." In a way, Trump-the-message is Reagan without Reagan’s amiability.

That’s why McCain’s attack on Trump’s supporters as “crazies” backfired. People don’t think that unlimited immigration of poor people, many of whom are welfare cases, criminals or unskilled laborers taking American jobs is a good idea. And when Trump backhanded McCain on his hero status he wasn’t “destroyed” like the conventional wisdom said he would be. And it’s why Rubio, Perry, Jeb and others, who misunderstand the Trump phenomenon, didn’t help themselves.

It was not wise for one of Walker’s supporter to refer to Trump as a “dumdum” because it gave Trump an excuse to counter-attack, something that Trump does with glee.

If the people you want to woo are the ones who like Trump’s ideas you don’t attack the man who articulates those ideas; you embrace them. Ted Cruz is the only one on the Republican bench who seems to understand that. He stood on the floor of the Senate and called Senator McConnell a liar. That resonates.

In flyover country people are wondering why the Republicans are not doing the things they promised to get elected. They are ready to believe that the Republican establishment doesn’t care about the middle class, and they don’t want the Democrats’ charity.

They’ve seen good paying jobs in Appalachian coal mines become casualties of the president’s war on coal. They’ve lost solid, middle class work on the oil rigs of the Gulf to a president more obsessed with tomorrow’s temperatures than today’s families. And they’ve bid goodbye to Midwestern factory jobs while the president saddles employers with oppressive taxes and regulations.

They’re the autoworkers whose fathers punched in at $30 an hour, and they’re trying to get by on a $15 hourly wage. They’re the legion of middle class workers who once had employer-provided health insurance, but now have to pay for most of their medical costs themselves.

They went to the polls and elected Republicans. But instead of good jobs they find the Republican establishment supporting an Obama trade deal that will ship more jobs overseas. They hear Jeb and Rubio talk about “comprehensive immigration reform” and know that it’s all about cheap Mexican labor taking their jobs. They were promised an end to ObamaCare but found that the Republican establishment was fine with funding it. They like their guns and their religion but find that Republican appointees to the Supreme Court think they’re bigots and yahoos who had better get their head straight and bake cakes for gay weddings.

So whose fault is it that a billionaire who gave more money to Democrats than Republicans now leads in the polls? You can only screw the people so many times before they get wise. The Democrats have managed to do that to their Black base for over half a century. It appears that the white, non-college working class Republican base is wising up faster.

If Republicans find themselves stymied by a billionaire huckster who many view as a stalking horse for a Hillary Presidency they have no one to blame but themselves.

A quick recap: Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, violated guidelines from the National Archives and her own State Department by using her own private email server for professional correspondence, and then destroying whatever messages she deemed destructible.

...

In sum, the Democratic Party's 2016 presidential frontrunner brazenly violated government transparency policy, made a mockery of the Freedom of Information Act, placed her sensitive communications above the law, and then just lied about it, again and again. Now comes word that, unsurprisingly, two inspectors general are recommending that the Department of Justice open a criminal inquiry into the matter. One of their findings was that the private server, contrary to Clinton's repeated claims, contained "hundreds of potentially classified emails."*

Do Democrats have any aversion left to Nixonian non-transparency, which had been so anathema to them during the presidency of George W. Bush? Here's a possible bellwether: Key Nixon-administration turncoat John W. Dean, who wrote a 2004 book entitled Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, reacted to the latest Clinton story by tweeting "Leaking This Makes It Pure Politics," and "GOP Behind False Charges In NYT. It's gonna be a long 16 months.

President Barack Obama never paid any political price for pulling a complete 180 on his vows to have the most transparent administration ever, so none of this reaction should be surprising. Still, it's worth stressing that with Hillary Clinton, Democrats have dropped even the pretense of giving a shit about transparency. And if you think that language is unduly harsh, don't take my word for it, take Paul Begala's:

Voters do not give a shit. They do not even give a fart… Find me one persuadable voter who agrees with HRC on the issues but will vote against her because she has a non-archival-compliant email system and I'll kiss your ass in Macy's window and say it smells like roses.

In what he calls a "global disaster" now unfolding in northern latitudes as the sea area that freezes and melts each year shrinks to its lowest extent ever recorded, Prof Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University calls for "urgent" consideration of new ideas to reduce global temperatures.In an email to the Guardian he says: "Climate change is no longer something we can aim to do something about in a few decades' time, and that we must not only urgently reduce CO2 emissions but must urgently examine other ways of slowing global warming, such as the various geoengineering ideas that have been put forward."These include reflecting the sun's rays back into space, making clouds whiter and seeding the ocean with minerals to absorb more CO2.

I wonder how much personal abuse Barack Hussein Obama is prepared to take to get his Iran deal? Based on the Iranian leader's reaction, I suspect they have him pegged and the answer to the question is "A great deal."

The country's up to here in bullshit, and many are not taking it any more.

The answer is that the vital political issues are no longer under the control of the American people. He says that the President and Congress stymie each other.

This implies that just about everything that’s actually going to happen in national-level politics is going to be happening by executive Fiat. ...[and]What doesn’t get done by executive fiat will be done by the courts, as in the Supreme Court’s recent rulings on ObamaCare and gay marriage.

Foreign policy decisions are made by one man: Barack Obama. Our markets and what we earn on our savings are under the control of the Federal Reserve. Our core cultural issues - abortion, infanticide, gay rights, the definition of marriage, even the definition of gender - are determined by the Supreme Court and once they tell you how to live you have to obey.

Republican politicians campaign to bring the beast to heel but when they get to Washington, they cut deals with the Big Money boys who have a vested interest in the status quo.

This is very dangerous over the long term. One of the things Alexis de Tocqueville liked to point out about the difference between the American and European systems of government is that the American viewed himself as a participant in the political arena, while the subjects of Europe’s monarchical regimes tended to view themselves merely as interested observers. Watching politics, for them, was like watching the weather. The outcome affected you, but there was nothing you could do about it.

Under the old American system the government didn't intrude into your life much, and when it did you could vote them out of office and life went on. Under the European system, when things got to a certain point the remedy was a bloody rebellion. The old order could not be voted out of office, so it was dragged through the streets and hung from the lamp-posts.

I think that Donald Trump's standing in the polls is a manifestation of the belief that government is out of control. In times of cultural or economic stress, an opportunity presents itself of someone becoming the proverbial "man on a white horse" riding to the rescue. When polled, 63% of the American people believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. When times are good, when people are satisfied and happy, the politician speaking in muted tones promising more of the same is popular. When people are unhappy and feel threatened they listen to the man who cries out for change in stentorian tones. That's Trump. And that's a wake-up call to all the politicians in Washington and especially to those who want to replace Obama.

The neighborhood with the largest concentration of gun carry permits in Chicago, Illinois is populated mostly by blacks and hispanics, a Chicago Sun-Times report reveals.

“Chicago’s highest concentration of permits is in the 60617 ZIP code—in the East Side neighborhood on the city’s Southeast Side—with 538 permits,” the report said. “According to the census, about 55 percent of the residents in 60617 are black, 34 percent are Hispanic and 7 percent white.”

If you lived in an area where thugs shoot people daily you would want to be able to protect yourself too.

Ted Cruz on Obama Immigration Policy

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

According to North Carolinians for Immigration Reform and Enforcement, illegal immigrants commit hundreds of sex crimes against children in that state every month -- 350 in the month of April 2014, 299 in May, and more than 400 sex crimes against children in August and September.

More than 90 percent of the perpetrators are Hispanic. I didn't know there were that many Hispanics in North Carolina! When not providing North Carolina farmers with cheap labor, immigrant workers seem to spend all their free time raping little girls. (It's a wonder they find the time to do all that drunk driving.)

These websites aren't even counting legal immigrants. It's bad enough that the government can't stop foreign rapists from sneaking into our country. But how about the rapists the government looked over and decided to let in?

We'll never know about their criminal predations, to say nothing of their burden on the taxpayers. The government won't tell us, and the media would bury the information if it did.

The cover-up is too relentless to be a coincidence. In February 2014, Carlos Gumercindo Crus, 42, was arrested for committing a felony sex offense on a 12-year-old girl in her home in Lexington, North Carolina. The headline was: "Man, 42, arrested for sexual offense with girl under 13."

Two weeks later, Jose Freddy Ambrosio-Gorgonio, 32, was arrested in Vale, North Carolina, for having sex with a 12-year-old girl. Headline: "Man charged with sexual assault of a minor." This was splashed in small, inside-the-paper items in two local newspapers, below the high school basketball scores.

This "Man" has been really busy! Why doesn't anyone arrest him?

With all the hysteria about a "rape culture" on America's campuses, the media and feminist groups are unconcerned about importing a non-indigenous group of rapists from other countries.

The future of marriage is here.

Widow Dominque Lesbirel of the Netherlands is getting married again, after losing her husband to kidney failure.She's getting hitched to her dog. Her first husband, Doerack, was a cat."Putting Doerack to sleep was horrible, I've had him since he was three, but I feel lucky to have had 16 lovely years with him," she said, according to Britain's Daily Mirror.She plans to wed Travis, but wants to wait a while to get over her grief at losing Doerack.

I'm fairly confident that the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges could see their way clear to inter-species marriage. Why limit the love that endures even past death to people; isn't that bigoted?

“As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves.”

The Dutch led the way in gay marriage, they are now breaking new paths.

"Teflon Don"

This essay reflects what many people in the country feel about Donald Trump. He's not afraid to stuck his thumb in the eye of the crew that's been screwing up so badly that anyone, literally anyone would be an improvement. Team Obama and the eunuchs in the Republican Party have set the bar so low that Donald Trump is actually considered a viable candidate.

Campaigning in Iowa over the weekend, Donald Trump was being, well, Donald Trump, fearlessly bellowing insults without mercy, until he finally landed a big blow on Old John McCain and managed to hit on the ONLY thing you cannot say bad about the senator from Arizona. In mocking and belittling Mr. McCain’s tortured service as a downed Navy pilot in a Hanoi prison camp, The Donald’s meteoric ascent seemed threatened — but just for a moment.

Impetuous, spoiled and self-absorbed, John McCain gives countless reasons to be derided and scorned. He has been a media darling for decades — not for any kind of principle, but rather for his willingness to sell out fellow Republicans if it gains him some political edge. Knighted the “maverick,” Mr. McCain can always be relied upon for a disparaging quote.

What does the Supreme Court Think About "Less Crunchy" Abortions?

The public relations department at Planned Parenthood is probably working overtime today, as there’s yet another undercover video of some of their top officials casually discussing over dinner and drinks at a nice restaurant the sale of organs from the fetuses are that aborted at their clinics....Both high officials acknowledge that Planned Parenthood would be willing to use different abortion techniques to harvest salable fetal organization, or “less crunchy” ones in the gruesomely tone-deaf terminology of one, and at this point we can ascertain whether the women who signed those consent forms that Planned Parenthood boasts of were informed of what risks those procedures might entail.

Making sure the baby comes out with salable organs intact does require a procedure that's harder on the woman than simply cutting the baby up and sucking out the parts.

Keep in mind that 58 million dead babies later, the American people never voted for abortion on demand. It was imposed as a Diktat by the Supremes who discovered the right to kill babies in the womb in the "penumbras and emanations" of the US Constitution. Attempts by elected officials to alter or abolish the practice are routinely swatted down by the Liberal Bloc of the court, defenders of the right to "crunchy" or "less crunchy" abortion.

We suspect that they are not nearly as troubled by the practice they created as people in general. Members of the Ruling Class don't typically frequent Planned Parenthood; they have more refined facilities what are higher priced and don't feel the incentive to shop baby organs around. On the other hand, we could be wrong; perhaps its an abortion industry standard.

We thought we would ask the Supremes for their opinion so we asked them via e-mail and are waiting a reply.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

The Republicans are always on defense on things like this. It aids this conventional wisdom I was describing in the previous half hour. The convention wisdom is that a statement like this is made by Trump, and everybody in the country's outraged by it, not just the media, not just the Democrats, not just Washington politician, but everybody. They're outraged in Boise. They're outraged in Tuscaloosa. They're outraged in San Francisco. They're outraged in Tijuana. They're outraged in Juarez. They're outraged in Mexico City. They're outraged in New York City, everywhere, Trump is hated universally, is the presumption, and therefore he's got to go.

He doesn't have a prayer because, as a Republican and as a confident braggadocio, he's a mean guy. The fact that he doesn't have a lot of public humility makes him a mean guy. Democrats are all nice people. Look, McCain has called Tea Party people hobbits, crazies, and in fact, let me find something here. I've got a Stack on all this stuff. Maybe it's the bottom one here. It's not the one I'm looking for. In 2008, seven years ago, Politico. Right here my formerly nicotine-stained fingers. "Some on Left Target McCain's War Record." It's by Ben Smith.

Mollie Hemingway notices that the MSM isn't reporting on Planned Parenthood's harvesting and sale of aborted baby fetal body parts much. She contrasts the coverage this story is getting with the saturation coverage of the Confederate flag, a story that began with murders in a Charleston church but quickly morphed into an attack story on all things Southern including children's toys.

Going with the assumption that reporters and editors may just be having trouble coming up with story ideas, she makes the following helpful suggestions.

We’ve heard about serial murderer/abortionist Kermit Gosnell keeping trophies of his victims, abortion clinics dumping babies in the trash, and now Deborah Nucatola working to do “a little better than break even” in the sales of intact baby organs. What’s the standard procedure for disposal of the unborn children killed in abortion? Are there abortion clinic standards for this? Does it vary state by state? Do states even have regulations? Does Planned Parenthood have uniform regulations? If not, why not? If so, how are they enforced?

How much money does Planned Parenthood receive via sales of baby organs? Do they keep records? Are those records trustworthy? How do we know? How significant are these funds to the abortion portion of Planned Parenthood’s operation? How does compensation for the children’s lungs, livers, hearts and brains vary by state, if they do vary?

Monday, July 20, 2015

The Butcher: It makes a huge difference. I’d say a lot of people want liver. And for that reason, most providers will do this case under ultrasound guidance, so they’ll know where they’re putting their forceps. The kind of rate-limiting step of the procedure is the calvarium, the head is basically the biggest part. Most of the other stuff can come out intact. It’s very rare to have a patient that doesn’t have enough dilation to evacuate all the other parts intact.

For the most part, the MSN is not in the business of reporting the news. This is sometimes difficult to remember, especially given the superficial resemblance between the language they use and straightforward reportage. Although the sentences they utter sound like assertions---in this case, assertions of ignorance as to motive---they are not. They are instructions to their audience as to what to think and say. The audience is well-trained: it recognizes its script and it knows what to do with it: it is to read from it until instructed otherwise. This is narrative journalism, in which the audience plays its part.

According to the narrative, there is no islamic terrorism. All the very best people---Obama, Cameron, Hollande, the prosecutor of the Boston bombings---know this. It has been declared to be a definitional truth, so it may not be gainsaid by any of your much-ballyhooed facts to the contrary. Thus is the narrative insulated from your so-called "reality"; and thus is the word of our Top Men made unimpeachable.

But the script writers have a problem: some of the investigators will be so unenlightened as to fail to understand that the world is as our Top Men say it is. If, in their foolishness, they create a great disturbance in the narrative by saying they've found some connection to Islam, the script will have the Chorus sing "self-radicalized", "lone wolf", and "domestic terrorism", with intimations of the "political illness" of Timothy McVeigh and those Confederate Republicans. Nothing will be allowed to embarrass our Top Men.

And for the cherry on top of this foul tasting sundae, here's a BBC News podcast.

If you have a theory as to why these shootings occurred, you may want to let your local news media know so they can pass on the information to the authorities. They're clearly clueless and dumbfounded at this time

Are Republicans going the way of the Whigs?

Sometimes the Ruling Class does not understand that the ground under their feet is no longer solid. That they are standing on quicksand and can disappear. The issue of illegal immigrants is not going to go away. The accepted wisdom that illegal immigrants need to be absorbed into the country is not accepted by most people. It's only accepted by the ruling Republicans who assume that illegals will become citizens and they need at least some of their votes to remain in office. But suppose the basic assumption is wrong, just as the assumption that slavery should be controlled rather than eradicated is wrong?

The party was ultimately destroyed by the question of whether to allow the expansion of slavery to the territories. With deep fissures in the party on this question, the anti-slavery faction prevented the nomination for a full-term of its own incumbent, President Fillmore, in the 1852 presidential election; instead, the party nominated General Winfield Scott. Most Whig party leaders eventually quit politics (as Abraham Lincoln did temporarily) or changed parties. The northern voter base mostly joined the new Republican Party. By the 1856 presidential election, the party was defunct.

How will the history of the Republican party in the 2016 election read in the Wikipedia of tomorrow?

Here’s a possibility:

The Republican Party was ultimately destroyed by the question of whether to leave the borders unsecured and mandate eventual citizenship for thirty million illegal aliens. With deep fissures in the party on this question, the anti-amnesty faction prevented the nomination of the leadership’s standard-bearer, Jeb Bush, in the 2016 presidential election; instead, the party nominated Donald Trump. Most Republican party leaders eventually quit politics or changed parties. The party’s voter base mostly joined the new American Party. By the 2020 presidential election, the GOP was defunct.

Trump’s candidacy has the potential to be one of those Black Swan events that reshapes huge parts of the American political, social, and cultural landscape. Will he do so? Who knows?

But he’s raising a ruckus, and it is a ruckus that badly needs to be raised.

The Total Failure Of Gun Control Captured In One Photo

“Federal Installation,” the top of the sign reads in black letters atop a yellow background. “Firearms Are Prohibited In This Facility.” The bullets that shattered the glass in more than a dozen places around the gun-free zone sign did not heed its commands.

Saturday, July 18, 2015

DRUDGE has a link to an article in The Hollywood Reporter on the defamation suit brought by University of Virginia (UVA) Dean Nicole Eramo. Rolling Stone responds by blaming UVA.

Rolling Stone was sued by Dean Eramo for defamation. The article by Erdely implied that Eramo and UVA did nothing to help "Jackie" and was "indifferent to rape on campus, and more concerned with protecting its reputation than with assisting victims of sexual assault."

Rolling Stone's lawyers said that it wasn't their fault that they got their facts wrong. They claim that the UVA administration, faculty and students all aided Sabrina Erdely as she wrote a totally fictitious story about a brutal gang rape in a UVA fraternity house. For how the story unraveled go here.

Rolling Stone's defense is that a UVA staff member named Emily Renda referred Erdely to "Jackie," the victim of the imaginary gang rape.

Here's the Rolling Stone version:

"Ms. Erdely did not stumble on Jackie's story. She was directed to Jackie by Emily Renda, then working closely with Dean Eramo in the Student Affairs office the — same Emily Renda that included Jackie's account of being 'gang-raped' in her Congressional testimony about campus sexual-assault policies. There is no question that both the author and Rolling Stone had full faith in Jackie's credibility and the accuracy of its Article at the time of publication. In no small measure, Rolling Stone believed in the credibility of Jackie's story because it came with the imprimatur of UVA, and of Dean Eramo specifically."

The Rolling Stone story hit UVA like a thunderbolt. Without waiting for an investigation UVA President Theresa Sullivan swung into action by banning all fraternities. The UVA administration, faculty and students assumed the story was true. There were marches on the fraternity, attacks on the building, and demands for the expulsion of the fraternity members.

In other words, the leaders of UVA believed in their hearts that the story was true even before an investigation was conducted. They "knew" that the men at that school were rapists ... and worse. They believed because they were primed to believe. They "knew" the story was true because it fit the belief in "rape culture" that covers academia like a noxious mist.

People at UVA were complicit in attempted destruction of their own school's reputation. But Sabrina Erdely is not an innocent victim of UVA women activists like Emily Renda. Erdely is the author of a number of what appear to be "rape hoax" stories like The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer and The Catholic Church's Secret Sex-Crime Files that have a common theme:

The narrative in each case is used to advance the theory that the institution in question (college administrators in the UVA case, military command in the Blumer case) is indifferent to the problem of systemic sexual assault occurring right under their noses.

Sabrina Erdely may well be the most prolific published serial liar since Stephen Glass. It's a sad commentary on the depth to which the media has fallen that Glass was exposed and his stories scrubbed while Erdely is still employed. But perhaps it's a good thing. It helps to put a face on evil.

Friday, July 17, 2015

Planned Parenthood owes Josef Mengele an apology.

A Kuwaiti-born immigrant named Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez shot and killed four servicemen on Thursday at a recruiting center and another military site in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but don’t jump to any conclusions that it might have anything to with Islam. There’s always a chance it was caused by some Confederate battle flag emblazoned on a passing pick-up, or something that some Republican presidential candidate might have said about immigration, and in any case it couldn’t have had anything to do with what everyone knows is a religion of peace.

By calling it "domestic terrorism" the Administration is putting it in the same category as the shootings in Charleston. But it's not, and most Americans who are not blinded by ideology, who don't hate their country and it's dominant culture, see through this sham.

Last week, I swung by the Bill Bennett show to chew over the news of the hour. A few minutes before my grand entrance, one of Bill's listeners had taken issue with the idea that these Supreme Court decisions weren't the end and, if you just got on with your life and tended to your garden, things wouldn't be so bad:

Claudine came on and said that's what Germans reckoned in the 1930s: just keep your head down and the storm will pass. How'd that work out?

David Kelsey writes from the University of South Carolina to scoff at that:

In one corner, we have government recognition of marriage contracts between gays. In the other corner, we have Jews, Catholics, gays, their sympathizes [sic] and other undesirables being put in Nazi concentration camps.

One of these things is nothing like the other, unless you're a lunatic. Maybe the reason conservatives keep "losing everything that matters" is because they really can't tell the difference. Which causes increasing numbers of people to recognize them as lunatics.

Since you call me and Claudine "lunatics", allow me to return the compliment and call you an historical illiterate. If "one of these things is nothing like the other", it's because that's never the choice: It's never a question of being Sweden, say, vs being the Islamic State (although, if you're a Jew in Malmö, they're looking a lot less obviously dissimilar than you might think).

All societies exist on a continuum. Neither Claudine nor I said a word about "concentration camps". But you give the strong impression that that's the only fact you know about Nazi Germany: Nazis = concentration camps, right? No wonder you think everything divides neatly into opposing "corners". In the world as lived, there are no neatly defined corners. Things start off in the corners and work their way toward the center of the room.

Claudine and I were talking about Germany in the Thirties - before the concentration camps and the Final Solution, before millions of dead bodies piled up in the gas chambers. So you need to have an imaginative capacity. It's not clear from your email that you do, but give it a go: Imagine being a middle-class German in 1933. No one's talking about exterminating millions of people - I mean, that would be just "lunatic" stuff, wouldn't it? And you belong to a people that regards itself as the most civilized on the planet - with unsurpassed achievements in literature and music and science. You might, if you were so minded, call it Teutonic Exceptionalism. And you're "progressive", too: you pioneered the welfare state under Bismarck, and prototype hate-speech laws under the Weimar republic. And yes, some of the beer-hall crowd are a bit rough, but German Jews are the most assimilated on the planet. The idea that such a society would commit genocide is not just "lunatic", it's literally unimaginable.

So don't even bother trying to imagine that. Instead try to imagine it's early 1933. The National Socialist German Workers Party is the largest party in parliament and thus President von Hindenburg has appointed its leader, Herr Hitler, as Chancellor - not der Führer, just Chancellor, the same position Frau Merkel holds today. And the National Socialist German Workers Party starts enacting its legislative programme, and so a few weeks later the Civil Service Restoration Law is introduced. Under this law, Jews would no longer be allowed to serve as civil servants, teachers or lawyers, the last two being professions in which Jews are very well represented.

But that wily old fox Hindenburg knows a thing or two. So as president he refuses to sign the bill into law unless certain exemptions are made - for those who've been in the civil service since August 1st 1914 (ie, the start of the Great War), and for those who served during the Great War, or had a father or son who died in action. And the practical effect of these amendments is that hardly any Jew in the public service has to lose his job.

Paul von Hindenburg died the following year, and his amendments were scrapped.

That's Germany's civil service in 1933. What of America's civil service in 2015?

Read the whole thing.

America's civil service:

The logic of the 1933 Civil Service Restoration Act is that the German public service will be judenrein. The logic of the 2015 Supreme Court decision is that much of the American public service will be christenrein - at least for those who take their Scripture seriously. That doesn't strike me as a small thing - even if one thought it were likely to stop there.